This was something I'd been considering doing for some weeks now, but some circumstances made me decide to get cracking on this last week
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That's very cool. I've been trying to record my mother's stories about our family. Initially I took my laptop over and captured them while she spoke, but I had to stop; she kept editing herself as if she were writing a story in third person! Now I listen and then rush home to my laptop and jot it all down. (Truman Capote was right, memory and conversation is better than taping or note-taking.) Further complicating the attempt is her memory, which has been slightly reorganized by a stroke. I have to rack my own memories and those of my sister and other relatives to see if what she says tallies with what we recall. But I love doing it.
Memory trick to enhance recall: try to remember something very specific from the memory in question, like the look of the kitchen table in a kitchen memory, or a scent, or the sound of a voice. You may not be able to, but even so, sometimes this accesses more associations for me and fleshes out the memory.
I've also been working through my Dad's old papers, letters, etc. I find, now that I'm the age he was when I was a toddler, that more than ever I miss the opportunity to talk about things with him. Teenagers don't know the right questions to ask.
The frustrating thing to me now is that I was asking all kinds of family history questions as a teenager, but still didn't really know what to ask. Heck, even though my grandmother was always willing to talk to me about our family, I know more about her mother's siblings now, thanks to the Internet, than I ever learned by talking to her--simply because I didn't think to ask.
I'm also now getting a real appreciation for overwhelming the Memory Book project is. :) I just wrote my longest entry by far, 4500 words, over the course of this afternoon: trying to compress seven years of 1980's memories of camping at Smith Mountain Lake into a few pages. I know I'll be adding stuff here and there until the books are turned over to the Kiddies, but still, it's a lot more daunting than I imagined.
Memory trick to enhance recall: try to remember something very specific from the memory in question, like the look of the kitchen table in a kitchen memory, or a scent, or the sound of a voice. You may not be able to, but even so, sometimes this accesses more associations for me and fleshes out the memory.
I've also been working through my Dad's old papers, letters, etc. I find, now that I'm the age he was when I was a toddler, that more than ever I miss the opportunity to talk about things with him. Teenagers don't know the right questions to ask.
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I'm also now getting a real appreciation for overwhelming the Memory Book project is. :) I just wrote my longest entry by far, 4500 words, over the course of this afternoon: trying to compress seven years of 1980's memories of camping at Smith Mountain Lake into a few pages. I know I'll be adding stuff here and there until the books are turned over to the Kiddies, but still, it's a lot more daunting than I imagined.
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